Figure out this Forest Service stupidity that lets forest fires burn when equipment is available to stop the fires.

AP labels the 2012 Colorado wildfires worst in state history in this story.
My friend and fellow climate skeptic, nationally syndicated radio host Lars Larson, asks some pointed and pertinent questions about what appears to be some of the most idiotic policy ever devised by government...This year the U.S. Forest Aervice will spend north of a billion dollars fighting forest fires across America. Billions of dollars worth of trees owned by the American people will go up in flames. And a $50 million dollar airplane that could put those fires out faster sits on the ground in Arizona because the U.S. Forest Service refuses to hire Evergreen Aviation. Now you may be saying, “There must be a good reason”. That’s what I thought, but then I remembered that government is capable of multibillion dollar stupidity on a daily basis. The Forest Service offers no explanation whatsoever.

This is infuriating. People are wallowing in filth, disease and misery, yet the elites take care of themselves.

As some 500 000 Haitians still live in displaced camps, five star hotels are being built amid shanty towns.
As part of the country's "Reconstruction", The Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund recently invested $2 million in the Royal Oasis Hotel, a deluxe structure to be built in a poverty-stricken metropolitan area "filled with displaced-persons camps housing hundreds of thousands”. Royal Oasis belongs to a Haitian investment group (SCIOP SA) and will be managed by the Spanish chain Occidental Hotels & Resorts.
AP reported in April that funds raised by the former US Presidents to help the neediest Haitians are now being used to build a hotel for "rich foreigners" including tourists as well many foreign NGO "aid workers" currently in Haiti.

Paul Krugman’s column this week is on the Supreme Court’s upholding of the individual mandate of the Affordable Health Care Act, a.k.a., Obamacare, under which the government forces every American under threat of penalty to purchase health insurance. He doesn’t offer much in the way of facts about what this law is or what it actually does, beyond celebrating the fact that it means more people—30 million more, to be precise (or as precise as the Congressional Budget Office’s estimate)—will now be insured.

If a bank is designated as too big to fail (TBTF), it gets on the gravy train. So concluded an editorial at Bloomberg.
It pays to be too big to fail.
In the case of J. P. Morgan Chase bank, the subsidy is worth $14 billion a year, according to research published by the International Monetary Fund.

Mitt Romney just now called for immediate entire repeal of Obamacare. Even with a GOP House, GOP Senate, and GOP President, that will be hard, because Dems can and will filibuster a bill, and a 60-vote GOP majority is not in the cards any time soon.
But repealing the individual mandate takes only 51 votes (50, if a Republican is the vice president). You see, Senators can’t filibuster a bill passed under “budget reconciliation.” Since Chief Justice John Roberts ruled today that Obama’s individual mandate is a tax, Republicans, it seems to me, could simply lower the tax for not having health insurance down to $0.00, as a matter of budget reconciliation.

Now that the Supreme Court has ruled Obamacare constitutional, a growing chorus of Republicans, including Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, are urging states to simply refuse to implement the law. Do they actually have that chance?
On Fox News on Thursday night Jindal declared, "Absolutely, we're not implementing the exchanges. We're not implementing ObamaCare" on Fox News Thursday night following the Supreme Court's ruling that Obamacare is constitutional. Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker's reaction to the ruling was essentially the same thing: "Wisconsin will not take any action to implement ObamaCare." And Sen. Jim DeMint of South Carolina has called on "every governor to stop implementing the health care exchanges." Some of said the pledges hint of the "nullification crisis" when South Carolina defied President Andrew Jackson and a federal tariff. But, despite the Supreme Court's ruling that states can opt out of a Medicaid expansion, there's not much that Jindal and Walker can do to prevent health insurance exchanges from being set up in their states.

With 60% of the American people already on some form of taxpayer subsidized healthcare, the mass hysteria over SCOTUS upholding Obamacare is most interesting. America is already a socialist nation and most Americans absolutely do demand government provided healthcare and support for Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs remains quite strong. Americans are just like everybody else – they want something for free (translation: at the expense of somebody else) but there is no such thing as a free anything and anything the government does is very costly, inefficient and life threatening. The left is angry because it wanted a single payer healthcare system (some Dems really wanted Obamacare declared unconstitutional). The right is angry because a piece of Democrat legislation was declared constitutional.
The healthcare mandate was hatched by the conservative Heritage Foundation back in the late 1980’s. Republicans made several attempts to pass it but the Democrats opposed it because they were holding out for a single payer system. Well, the Republicans got their dream mandate – it’s named Obamacare.

The high court ’s ruling leaves in place 21 tax increases in the health-care law costing more than $675 billion over the next 10 years, according to the House Ways and Means Committee . Of those, 12 tax hikes would affect families earning less than $250,000 per year, the panel said, including a “Cadillac tax” on high-cost insurance plans, a tax on insurance providers, and an excise tax on medical device manufacturers.

George Will makes some interesting observations on the SCOTUS Obamacare decision and actually believe that it will advance the cause of liberty.

If the mandate had been upheld under the Commerce Clause, the Supreme Court would have decisively construed this clause so permissively as to give Congress an essentially unlimited police power — the power to mandate, proscribe and regulate behavior for whatever Congress deems a public benefit. Instead, the court rejected the Obama administration’s Commerce Clause doctrine. The court remains clearly committed to this previous holding: “Under our written Constitution ... the limitation of congressional authority is not solely a matter of legislative grace.”
The court held that the mandate is constitutional only because Congress could have identified its enforcement penalty as a tax. The court thereby guaranteed that the argument ignited by the mandate will continue as the principal fault line in our polity.
The mandate’s opponents favor a federal government as James Madison fashioned it, one limited by the constitutional enumeration of its powers. The mandate’s supporters favor government as Woodrow Wilson construed it, with limits as elastic as liberalism’s agenda, and powers acquiring derivative constitutionality by being necessary to, or efficient for, implementing government’s ambitions."

Nothing exemplifies the ghetto status of the U.S. economy more than the success of Wal-Mart in the face of the ongoing destruction of what was once a vibrant and strong middle class. In case you missed it, Marion Nestle, Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at NYU, came out with some interesting tidbits regarding the food stamp program. One of them is extraordinarily disturbing. She shows that Wal-Mart’s gets as much as 25% to 40% of revenue at some stores from food stamp dollars. This says it all folks. Food stamps are or course the perfect business for Wal-Mart and JP Morgan, which as I pointed out previously makes a lot of money running the program and keeping the populace in perpetual serfdom.

The Supreme Court today upheld "Obamacare," a massive economic intervention ostensibly designed to cure the ills of American healthcare. Of course those ills were themselves caused by intervention, and this "cure" will only make the situation even worse. The "cycle of interventionism" Mises warned us about continues to intensify.

While the national numbers from the latest NBC/WSJ poll show a stable presidential race, First Read notes Mitt Romney had a "rough month" in the swing states.
"Among the voters in our poll living in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin, Obama's lead over Romney increases to 50%-42%. Also in these swing states, Romney's favorability numbers have dropped: A month ago, Romney's fav/unfav score stood at 34%/38% nationally and 36%-36% in these 12 swing states. But in this latest survey, his national fav/unfav score is 33%-39% (that 39% unfav is tied with his all-time high) and 30%-41% in the swing states."

Salon ran an article yesterday entitled “’Tough luck’ becomes law ” by Andrew Koppelman, in which he laments the Affordable Care Act’s prospects with the Supreme Court. The subtitle was: “Is the Supreme Court about to enshrine ruthless libertarianism in the Constitution?”

Wednesday, June 27, 2012

The tox reports are in - the naked FL guy who supposedly ate the face off another naked guy was not high on bath salts or any other exotic street drugs.

Contrary to what many media sources have been previously reporting, the freak attack in Miami involving a man “eating” another man’s face can not be blamed on bath salts. Ever since the story first ran, there has been constant talk of how the use of bath salts is causing cannibalism, among its other outlandish effects. But many of these claims have been unfounded, based on anecdotal evidence or even…no evidence at all. This case is a perfect example of how the media runs a story without doing any real journalism, and is forced to back-peddle.

This incredible graphic posted at visual.ly by Canada's National Post documents all the nuclear weapons that are ready to fly on short notice. The U.S. leads the charge with 1,379 launchers. Russia reaches a close second with 1,286. The author points out it's very difficult to discern what nuclear weapons exist because every country has a different method of cataloging them. But even what's here is pretty powerful.

It may be me but there is something particularly unnerving about Germans declaring circumcisions illegal. Yet, a court in Cologne has declared that Jewish and Muslim parents who circumcise their sons for religious reasons are committing child abuse.
The Court held that a legal guardian’s authority over a child does not allow them to subject them to the procedure and further found that religious freedom does not justify the commission of physical harm on a child. The case involved a Muslim doctor, who performed circumcision on a four-year-old boy at his parents’ request and the boy had to be hospitalized due to complications. What is interesting is that the court somehow heard of the incident and launched a criminal investigation.

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

As if we needed another story to further solidify the running joke that has become the U.S. stock market. In this article from Bloomberg we find out that:
High-frequency trading firms are drawing scrutiny from U.S. regulators seeking evidence that they may be distorting market prices by conducting transactions with themselves, said two people with knowledge of the matter.
But fear not America, the SEC is on the case!

Statists hate the bill because it facilities the use of consensual private contracts for surrogacy - it's voluntary and doesn't create any busybody government agencies to lord over how a woman chooses to use her own body.

A proposed New Jersey law would revise the state’s surrogate parenting laws to legalize a new type of surrogacy, called “gestational surrogacy.” ...
Megan Demarco reports that the bill “provides guidelines for legal contracts between couples and the woman who carries their fertilized egg [and] would allow the intended parents to cover the surrogate’s expenses related to the pregnancy.”
Remarkably, though unsurprisingly, various people and groups want gestational surrogacy outlawed. Demarco notes that “Opponents of the bill run the ideological gamut, from New Jersey Right to Life to the National Organization for Women.” Their main beef is encapsulated by attorney Harold Cassidy: “The exploitation of women if this bill becomes law is unfathomable.” Critics fear that the bill “will create a for-profit business, where ‘brokers’ will make a profit off vulnerable women.”
These busybodies apparently believe that women are incapable of determining what is in their own best interest.

Is Congress maybe waking up to the fact that the executive branch has way too much power and unjustly invokes its powers to the detriment of accountability, transparency and liberty?

Obama and his successors in the White House would be banned from using false claims of national security to conceal “embarrassing or unlawful conduct” by the government, under new legislation proposed by lawmakers on both sides of the House.
The proposed State Secrets Protection Act, H.R. 5956, introduced by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-New York), would be the first law to rein in the president’s “state secrets privilege,” a nearly limitless power to kill litigation by claiming a lawsuit would expose national security information to the benefit of America’s enemies. First recognized by the US Supreme Court in a McCarthy-era lawsuit in 1953, the privilege (.pdf) has been increasingly and successfully invoked in the post-9/11 era to shield the government and its agents from court scrutiny in cases involving rendition, torture, warrantless wiretapping, and the lethal targeting of U.S. citizens.

With the 2012 political season heating up, many people are calling for a ban on the SuperPacs created in the wake of the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision. A few on the left have even called for a constitutional amendment to ban corporations from making political advertisements, for fear that corporations have come to dominate elections in the United States.
In one sense, they are right. But it's not the SuperPacs. The corporations that have been dominating the public debate for decades are the media empires. Right now, six corporations control most of the television, radio, and print publishing networks that Americans see on a daily basis. They drive the debate, and the social issues behind the debate.

A political website that contained stinging criticism of the Obama administration and its handling of the Fast and Furious scandal was ordered to be shut down by the Obama campaign’s ‘Truth Team’, according to private investigator Douglas Hagmann, who was told by ISP GoDaddy his site contained information that was “maliciously harmful to individuals in the government.”

The General Court passed it, and now the governor of New Hampshire has signed it as of Friday, June 22, 2012. The law of the state now reads at RSA Sec. 519:23-a as follows:
“519:23-a Right of Accused. In all criminal proceedings the court shall permit the defense to inform the jury of its right to judge the facts and the application of the law in relation to the facts in controversy.”